Open Source Customers
Yesterday I came across a blog post titled The Indulgences of Open Source which made me a little angry first. It's author, Jonathan Cogley, rants about missing “customer savviness” in Open Source projects. Eg. he writes about DokuWiki:
Their website only distributes the DokuWiki download as a .tgz file. […] However DokuWiki supports Windows and yet this file extension is not natively supported by Windows XP or Vista or Windows Server. What commercial company with half a brain would release their product in a format that their customers could not consume without a third party tool to unpackage it?
So is he right? Yes and no. He might point out valid points for possible improvements but his attitude is very wrong. It seems hard to grasp for Jonathan how Open Source projects and its authors work. The idea to be treated as DokuWiki customer is wrong from the beginning:
cus·tom·er, noun, one that purchases a commodity or service
Webster Dictionary
You get DokuWiki for free, you don't purchase it – not even if you donate a few bucks.
Let me explain how I see it. To me, DokuWiki users are friends not customers. I give you my software because I like you and think you might like the software. I don't expect anything in return. I'm happy to hear if you like it or if you have ideas for improvements. If you do, I'm happy to work on it with your help. But if you start to make demands I feel exploited. Of course this “friends” analogy is a little bit far fetched, but you should understand how Jonathan's post made me angry in the first place.
So I give away the software for free and there are a lot of friendly people in the mailinglist, the forum and the IRC channel who are all happy to help if they have an idea, but nobody is obligated to do so. Of course this might not be enough for some, relying on friends can be hard sometimes 
. If you really want to be treated as customer you should pay for it, eg. my company offers Business Support for DokuWiki.
About the two points raised by Jonathan - I posted a reply to his post that might help, but I won't do zip files. The format is pretty limited and does not handle file permissions. Providing two formats is more work which benefits only the lazy. There are excellent tools available to use tgz files on a Windows system. If this is already to much hassle, then feel free to send me $5 and I will handcraft a personal zip file for you .
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Comments
2You miss the point of "users", Jonathan. Users for a software are not 100% of Human beings, for Dokuwiki it is a small sub-group who knows that they want a Wiki (and know what it is), who knows what a web server is, who has a host on a network, etc. So, let's face it, the audience of Dokuwiki is techies, geeks, computer or internet enthusiasts, workers, etc.
I would expect that most of such an audience (what ever platform they use) knows how to deal with a .tgz or .tar.gz file. And even if they do not, they probably have the necessary tools already installed, so double-clicking the file will solve their problem. Also, this kind of audience will quickly drop a message on a BBS or forum and get a quick answer on that one.
So clearly, you might have a point, but your example is wrong and you did not think deep enough. What you should have said about open source software is that sometimes their author create them for themselves first, and this might be different that what an intended audience might want. That's why they are so many forks and choices in this world :-) and I'm happy about it!
Commercial applications tend to think more in term of audience, of course they have to sell the products to survive. But they tend to aim at the vast majority of their audience, not 100%. And for the rest there is no luck... as you cannot fork Photoshop for example ;-)
Last point, free software are getting more mature nowadays and projects are really starting to identify their target audience and to work with and for them. Think of Gnome and usability for example :-)
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I am very aware of the gift culture and the ideas behind open source but they don't excuse producing and delivering good software. (Personally I would prefer you charge for your software and if it is good then I will happily pay - and I think DokuWiki is very good)
If open source software wants to get to the next level and be taken seriously by the mainstream then it needs to stop hiding behind the "you didn't pay for it" excuse.